What's in a name?

In What's in a name?, historian Susan Amussen traces William Shakespeare's life through early modern England to show how a glover's son could have become the world's greatest author.

The poetry of suicide

A profound exploration of the connection between poetry and suicide.‘Suicides have a special language’, Anne Sexton wrote in her 1964 poem ‘Wanting to Die’. But is it a language we can learn to read?In The poetry of suicide, J. T. Welsch interweaves stories of poets who took their own lives with ...

Open graves, open minds

Relates the Undead in literature and other media to questions concerning genre, technology, consumption and social change

David bowie, enid blyton and the sun machine

A dazzling act of literary-critical rebellion, casting new light on the lives of David Bowie and Enid Blyton

Saga emotions

A wide ranging discussion of emotions in the key historically oriented prose genres of medieval Iceland, explored through a range of case studies.

Dr faustus: the a- and b- texts (1604, 1616)

Dr. Faustus is one of the jewels of early modern English drama, and is still widely performed today. Interestingly, the play has come down to the contemporary audience in two distinct versions that have become known as the 'A' and the 'B' texts. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, who edited the ...

Shakespeare's adolescents

Shakespeare’s adolescents examines the varied representation of adolescent characters in Shakespeare’s plays. Using early modern medical knowledge, the book unpacks complexities that surrounded the cultural and theatrical representations of the ‘signs’ of the maturation used to construct Shakespe...

Fantastic histories

Details the political and cultural contexts of the entry of fairies to the historical record in twelfth century England, and the subsequent political uses of fairy narratives in both insular and continental history and romance, revealing the fairy as a contested marker of historicity and fictiona...

Graveyard gothic

This collection of essays considers the significance of graveyards in Gothic literature, film, television and video games. The chapters incorporate discussion of Gothic texts from around the world, offering a compelling new account of the graveyard’s importance as a key location for Gothic art an...

Thierry and theodoret

This is the first fully annotated, single-volume critical edition of Fletcher, Massinger, and Field's Thierry and Theodoret, with an introduction that reassesses sources (including Shakespeare) and discusses the authorship and reception of this captivating play, pointing the way for future study,...

Love and anti-judaism in medieval english romance

This book examines the theological questions posed by portrayals of love, sexual violence, and sacrifice in medieval romance. The book argues that these themes are by nature entangled with the discourse of anti-Judaism, which can be turned inwardly to expose irresolution within Christianity itself.

Mid-century gothic

Mid-Century Gothic offers a fresh perspective on the cultural moment that followed World War II, and discovers a deep sense of unease mingling with optimism about the future. By reassessing the novels, films, visual culture and technologies of the period, the book argues that gothicism itself was...

The first and second parts of king edward iv

Edward IV' was one of the most popular plays of the early modern period, making a vital contribution to the genres of both chronicle history and the newly emergent 'domestic' tragedy. It is a work rich with allusions to the political and cultural controversies of its time, and a drama which demo...

Shakespeare's borrowed feathers

This book uses the latest techniques in textual analysis to reveal the influence of a community of English playwrights on the celebrated works of William Shakespeare.

The gothic and death

An interdisciplinary collection providing new perspective on the interface between the gothic and death, with fresh readings of established, overlooked and recent Gothic works across a variety of cultural and literary forms.

Anthony burgess and america

This book is a critical biography and literary cultural analysis of Burgess’s interactions with the United States of America and American society, using newly discovered documents, archival research and Burgess’s entire canon to investigate the profound influence of America on Burgess’s life and ...

In the company of wolves

This volume of essays presents innovative research from a variety of perspectives on the cultural significance of wolves, children raised by wolves, and werewolves, as portrayed in different media and genres.

Critical games

Critical Games is about the games we play, the ways we play them, and what happens when they get out of hand. With readings of a range of cultural texts, from the Ancient Greeks to contemporary auto-fiction, it pinpoints what is critical in games and game-playing.

The gothic literature and history of new england

The Gothic Literature and History of New England surveys the origin, nature and future of the Gothic mode in New England’s history and literature, from the Puritans to the present, showing how the legacy of religious intolerance, racism and misogyny haunts fiction, film and popular culture.

Line endings in renaissance poetry

This book looks at how Renaissance poets ended their poetic lines. It considers a range of strategies and argues that line endings are crucial to our understanding of the poems. 

Translation theory for literary translators

This book analyses how practicing literary translators can benefit from translation theory.

Archipelagothic: studies in the philippine gothic

Archipelagothic: The Gothic in Philippine Culture is an edited volume that brings together essays that examine the place of the gothic in Philippine culture. This groundbreaking volume, the first book on the topic, is appropriately comprehensive, covering a range of genres, historical periods, re...

Charles de foucauld’s reconnaissance au maroc, 1883–1884

Reconnaissance au Maroc is Charles de Foucauld’s adventurous memoir of exploring Morocco. For eleven months in 1883–84, Foucauld travelled incognito through a country then off-limits to Europeans, mapping its waterways. This book is a translation of Foucauld’s memoir into English, with an extensi...

Suburban space, the novel and australian modernity

‘Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity’ investigates the interaction between suburbs and suburbia in a century-long series of Australian novels. It puts the often trenchantly anti-suburban rhetoric of Australian fiction in dialogue with its evocative and imaginative rendering of subu...

Relics, dreams, voyages

This book presents a wide-ranging and original meditation on cartographies of connection in all the arts of the baroque period.

Approaches to emotion in middle english literature

A significant new account of emotion in Middle English literature, proposing key methodologies for the analysis of feeling and affect in literary texts. It shows how contemporary audiences learned to understand emotion in themselves and others, through empathetic response, the development of fict...

Love's cure, or the martial maid

A fully annotated critical edition of John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s ground-breaking comedy Love’s Cure, or The Martial Maid (1615), a fascinating exploration of the journey of two transgender characters in an adverse heteronormative society. This Revels Plays edition offers a modernised te...

Bad english

Bad English examines the impact of increasing language diversity in transforming contemporary literature in Britain, in the context of its contested language politics. Exploring a range of poetry and prose, it makes the case for literature as the preeminent medium to probe the terms and condition...

Luminous presence

Luminous presence: Derek Jarman's life-writing is the first book to analyse the prolific writing of queer icon Derek Jarman. Much of Jarman's powerful, imaginative response to HIV/AIDS can be found in his remarkable books, which Alexandra Parsons argues were critical in changing the cultural term...

Suicide and the gothic

Suicide and the Gothic is the first study of the representation of suicide in Gothic texts from the eighteenth century to the present. Poems, short stories, novels, films and video games are covered from European, American and Asian contexts.

Sir philip sidney: the countess of pembroke's arcadia

This is an edition of Sir Philip Sidney’s New Arcadia in modern spelling that makes the text accessible through an enhanced glossary and expanded commentary covering book history, reception history, and Sidney’s contribution to the English language.

British culture after empire

This book follows the afterlives of empire from 1945 to present day, providing an interdisciplinary analysis of how the legacy of empire continues to shape the cultures, politics, spaces and memories of contemporary Britain. The essays it contains illustrate this with reference to a series of loc...

The pianoplayers

Anthony Burgess’s funny, moving, autobiographical novel that brings to life the world of silent cinemas and music-halls of 1920s Manchester and Blackpool. Fully annotated and with a new introduction, this is an authoritative text for a new generation of readers.

Greek drama iii: essays in honour of kevin lee (bics supplement 87)

A cultural history of the punisher

A close reading of one of the most murderous characters in popular culture. First introduced in 1974, the Punisher has inspired three movies, a Netflix series, and more than one thousand comics and graphic novels. His stories have celebrated, interrogated, and satirized the politics of vengeance....

Books, readers and libraries in fiction

This volume explores the depiction of books, libraries and reading in fiction from the medieval period to the present. Its varied case studies address common themes such as gender, genre and the relation between reading and writing itself and examine what fictional representations of reading tell...

The cloud of unknowing

Describes the contemplative method centered around eliminating all noise and images from the mind, and in that encounter with nothingness, finding God. Accessible to students and teachers by including a gloss, introduction, notes, and glossary. This text gives a great introduction to the ethos of...

Humor 2.0

The book shows how humor has changed since the advent of the internet: new genres, new contexts, and new audiences. The book provides a guide to such phenomena as memes, video parodies, photobombing, and cringe humor. Included are also in-depth discussions of the humor in phenomena such as Dogeco...

End of empire and the english novel since 1945

First book-length critical work devoted to the impact of the end of empire and traces of imperial memory in mainstream English Literature since the Second World War. Authors studied include Josephine Tey, William Golding, Penelope Lively, David Peace and Ian McEwan. Represents the best of current...

An humorous day's mirth

George Chapman's An Humorous Day's Mirth is one of the Elizabethan theatre's most successful comedies. In his new Revels edition, Charles Edelman presents a play that will delight today's readers and audiences as much as it did those of 1597.

A landscape of words

This book examines major literary texts by and about the Irish in the Middle Ages, providing an analysis of a spatial poetics developed over 600 years. It argues that the Irish theorised anew the concept of ‘place’ and developed a ‘spatial turn’ that reconfigured how communities in the Irish Sea ...

Gothic death 1740–1914

Drawing on a range of popular Gothic and Victorian novels, poems and short stories, this book provides the first full length study of representations of death and dying in Gothic texts between 1740 and 1914.

Moving through modernity

'Moving through modernity' offers the first full-length account of modernism from the perspective of a critical literary geography, and in stimulating new readings of E.M. Forster, Imagism, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Rhys, this book demonstrates how space and geography were also centra...

Edmund spenser and the romance of space

Edmund Spenser and the romance of space seeks to gauge the roles that aesthetic subjectivity and the imagination play in early modern spatial and textual practices.

The european byron

This book considers how Byron’s cosmopolitanism, mobility, and chameleon style influenced Byron’s identity in West and Eastern Europe. Transformed by French translations, Byron’s work was read by Thomas Moore, Ugo Foscolo, Lady Mosergan, Madame de Staël, Adam Mickiewicz and Alexander Pushkin. His...

Performing heritage

Performing Heritage is the first book to bring together the range of voices, debates and practices that constitute the fields of museum theatre and live interpretation. Inspiring and challenging in its scope and level of debate, Performing Heritage crosses the disciplines of performance and museu...

Thomas more's utopia in early modern europe

Thomas More's Utopia in Early Modern Europe provides the first complete account of all the editions of Utopia, whether vernacular or Latin, printed before 1650, together with a transcription of all the prefatory materials they contain. The reception of the idea of Utopia in early modern Europe h...

Mother bombie

Mother Bombie is unique among Lyly’s comedies. Structured upon a Roman New Comedy model, the play turns on a tissue of misconceptions surrounding the efforts of four fathers to secure socially advantageous marriages for their heirs and the determination of their young servants to exploit their m...

A theory of thrills, sublime and epiphany in literature

A psychological explanation of goosebumps and tears, of the epiphanic experience of seeing something ordinary in a profoundly new way, and of the overwhelming perception of the sublime. These experiences found in life and literature involve a feeling of coming to know something deeply important b...

Philaster: or love lies a-bleeding

Now back in print after a lengthy absence, one of the most enduring plays of its time. Edited by the renowned scholar, and recent advisor to the Globe Theatre, Andrew Gurr. No real competition for this singular play. Joins the now very impressive roster of The Revels Plays, almost thirty of which...

Charlotte brontë

Charlotte Brontë: legacies and afterlives is a timely reflection on the persistent fascination and creative engagement with Charlotte Brontë’s life and work. The new essays in this volume, which cover the period from Brontë’s first publication to the twenty-first century, explain why her work has...

White before whiteness in the late middle ages

This ground-breaking book analyses premodern whiteness as operations of fragility, precarity and racialicity across bodily and nonsomatic figurations. It argues that the ‘before’ of whiteness is less a retro-futuristic temporisation than a set of strategies and discursive praxes that produce and ...

Love's victory

Love’s Victory is the first romantic comedy written in English by a woman, and this Revels edition is the first fully-authorised, modern spelling edition of this play by Lady Mary Wroth.

Thomas ‘jupiter’ harris

This is the first biography of Thomas Harris: confidant of George III, ‘spin doctor’, philanthropist, sexual suspect, brothel owner, and the man who controlled Covent Garden theatre for nearly five decades.

Poetaster

Set in Ancient Rome, "Poetaster" offers one of the first and most subtle statements in English of the Augustan cultural ideal. Jonson contrasts Augustus' wise rule with an English polity dominated (like the stage) by malice, intrigue and envy. This text examines these different strands so skilful...

Same old

This book provides a new way of understanding queer culture. The frameworks offered by queer theory—steeped in philosophical, theoretical and political commitments to 'difference'—have obscured the important investments in 'sameness' that have been central to queer history. Same old dwells on the...

David and bathsheba

Martin’s new critical edition of George Peele’s David and Bathsheba opens up this explosive drama about the turbulent and bloody Davidic period of Ancient Israel’s history to student and scholar alike with its modernized text, full scholarly apparatus, comprehensive introduction, and commentary n...

The uncanny

This is the first book-length study of the uncanny, an important topic for contemporary thinking on literature, film, philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism and queer history.

Every man in his humour

The 1601 quarto version of Johnson's play, set in Florence

The aphrodysial or sea-feast

This edition for the first time makes available in print a semi-diplomatic edition of William Percy’s The Aphrodysial, as preserved in Huntington Library MS HM4. The accompanying introduction provides an account of Percy and his manuscript, and discusses the layers of authorial revisions and exte...

Sleep and its spaces in middle english literature

This book shows how sleep and the spaces in which it takes place animate ethical codes and emotive scripts, shaping a range of medieval English genres. In particular, it demonstrates the significance of sleep-related motifs to Middle English romance and offers a more embodied understanding of dre...

Euphues: the anatomy of wit and euphues and his england john lyly

Modern-spelling edition of the two works, allows the twenty-first century reader access to this culturally significant text.

Ghosts and the gothic

This collection examines ghostly presences (and absences) in both classic and lesser-known Gothic texts from the beginning of the genre to the present in a global context.

Scepticism and belief in english witchcraft drama, 1538–1681

This book explores the representation of witchcraft in early modern drama, situating it within the discourse of scepticism and credulity that characterised the witchcraft debate, and the historical events which inspired much witchcraft drama. It covers the drama of the Elizabethan period and the ...

The catholicism of literature in the age of the book of common prayer

This book demonstrates the continuity of Roman Catholicism in English Literature in a Biblicist age which established the Church of England through the Book of Common Prayer. Key figures covered include William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, Queen Henrietta Maria, John Donne, Margaret...

The roman actor

Edition of Philip Massinger's most renowned play, part of the inestimable Revels Plays; for all students and academics of early modern drama

The poetry of carol ann duffy

The first full-length collection of essays on the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy. Duffy's poetry is both respected by academics, and widely read and enjoyed by both children and adults. Approaches Duffy's work from a variety of literary theoretical perspectives, including feminism, masculinity, nation...

Botany, sexuality and women's writing, 1760–1830

In this fascinating study, Samantha George explores the cultivation of the female mind and the feminised discourse of botanical literature in eighteenth-century Britain. In particular, she discusses British women’s engagement with the Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus, and his unsettling discovery ...

Three sixteenth-century dietaries

Three sixteenth century dietaries makes a significant contribution to our understanding of early modern culture. It provides the first modern edition of three of the most important dietaries of the time - with the texts offering advice on the best ways to maintain well-being.

Galatea and midas

Two of John Lyly's most engaging plays

The family of love

The Family of Love is a rumbustious citizen comedy. Delivering farcical twists on familiar dramatic situations, it offers a glimpse of spiritual freedom in paraperopandemical times.

The early modern english sonnet

This volume updates current assumptions about the early modern English sonnet and its reception and inclusion in poetic collections. It deals both with major (Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser) and minor (Harvey, Barnes) sonneteers, and includes the first modern edition of a 1603 printed miscellany, T...

Borrowed objects and the art of poetry

This study uses examinations of Exeter riddles, Old English religious verse and Beowulf to formulate the poetics of spolia – creative transformations of martial and architectural plunder serving to signal metatextual reflection.

Shakespeare's storms

Explains the special effects used to represent storms in the early modern playhouses, and details how those effects filter into Shakespeare's dramatic language. With chapters on Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth, Pericles and The Tempest

Not magic but work

Newly available in paperback, this is a detailed description of the intensive work process involved in the making of Toy Symphony, a play by Michael Gow, directed by Neil Armfield and brought to the stage for the first time in December 2007 by Company B at the Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney. Dr...

The new inn

The New Inn is one of the most neglected of Jonson's plays which is now finding a new and appreciative audience. The spelling has been modernised and the text updated and corrected for this paperback edition. There is also a critical introduction, helpful appendices and a commentary which explai...

Women poets of the english civil war

Featuring modernised spelling and detailed explanatory notes, this anthology of Civil War-era women poets is perfect for students of English literature and early modern studies.

Hélène cixous

A lucid, original and inventive critical introduction to Helene Cixous (1937-). Royle offers close readings of many of her works, from Inside (1969) to the present. He foregrounds Cixous's importance for 'English literature' as well as creative writing, autobiography, narrative theory, psychoanal...

The lady’s trial

The first scholarly edition of a little-known play by a major Renaissance playwright, which interestingly reworks Othello.

Bakhtin and cultural theory

An important collection of essays which treats Bakhtin as a provocative theorist whose work must be tested, explored and compared with the work of others. Contributors assess Bakhtin's contribution to difficult issues of colonialism, feminism, reception theory and theories of the body, amongst ot...

A king and no king

This fully annotated version makes available on one of the most popular and influential plays by Beaumont and Fletcher, young contemporaries of Shakespeare. In discussing sources and stage history, the critical introduction challenges the common modern devaluation of these playwrights and offers ...

Spectral dickens

Spectral Dickens posits a spectral dimension of literary character. By analyzing Dickens’ illustrated novels through a frame of ontologically haunted concepts like the Freudian uncanny, Derridean spectrality, and the Lacanian Real, Bove’s work haunts the opposition between fictional character and...

Byron and italy

How did Italy Italianise Byron? And how did Byron Byronise Italy? These are the key questions that the volume sets out to answer.

Essex

Collection of new essays about the earl of Essex, one of the most important figures of the Elizabethan court

Region, religion and patronage

Explores the network of social, political and spiritual connections in north west England as a site for regional drama, introducing the reader to the non-metropolitan theatre spaces which formed a vital part of early modern dramatic activity. Uses the possibility that Shakespeare began his theat...

Neoliberal gothic

A comprehensive study of how different Gothic forms have adapted, engaged with and represented the neoliberal agenda across the globe.

People and piety

This compelling collection examines the ‘lived devotion’ of men and women in England’s Long Reformation. Through cutting-edge research, fourteen chapters explore how English piety was at once segregational and social, fixed in principle yet fluid in practice, and where authors worked out their fa...

The maid's tragedy

Fully annotated edition of the most powerful of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays

The daring muse of the early stuart funeral elegy

A broad reading of the period’s rich trove of funeral elegies, in both manuscript and print, which daringly use individual deaths as opportunities for ethical reflection, political comment, and even satire.

Love's metamorphosis

Lyly's most elegantly structured play, newly edited from the quarto of 1601

Globalgothic

This collection of essays redefines what gothic has become in the contemporary world, examining the idea of an emerging gothic that is inextricable from the broader global context in which it circulates. Globalgothic expands the horizons of the genre in diverse new and exciting ways.

What is we?

The concept "we" is central to every field in the interdisciplinary humanities and social sciences, yet it has been overdetermined by the question of “who we are”, leaving its basic conceptual operations undertheorized. In What is We? Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan argues that “we” is not a collectiv...